Quotes from The Prince of Mist

“Age makes you notice certain things. For example, I now know that a man’s life is broadly divided into three periods. During the first, it doesn’t even occur to us that one day we will grow old, we don’t think that time passes or that from the day we are born we’re all walking toward a common end. After the first years of youth comes the second period, in which a person becomes aware of the fragility of life and what begins like a simple niggling doubt rises inside you like a flood of uncertainties that will stay with you for the rest of your days. Finally, toward the end of life, the period of acceptance begins, and, consequently, of resignation, a time of waiting.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, quote from The Prince of Mist

“Whenever it poured like this, Max felt as if time was pausing. It was like a cease-fire during which you could stop whatever you were doing and just stand by a window for hours, watching the performance, an endless curtain of tears falling from heaven.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, quote from The Prince of Mist

“[H]e lay awake, dreading the dawn when he would have to say good-bye to the small universe he had built for himself over the years.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, quote from The Prince of Mist

“Max had once read in one of his father's books that some childhood images become engraved in the mind like photographs, like scenes you can return to again and again and will always remember, no matter how much time goes by.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, quote from The Prince of Mist

“He lost himself in the words and images conjured in his mind and for a while forgot ... He found himself flying among stars and planets ...”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, quote from The Prince of Mist

“Now he knew that any memories he might cherish during the last years of his life would be only fictions from a biography he'd never lived.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, quote from The Prince of Mist

“1My father says a hunch is your brain’s way of taking a short cut to the truth,’ replied Max.
‘He’s a wise man, your father. What else does he say?’

‘That the more you try to hide from the truth, the quicker it finds you.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, quote from The Prince of Mist

“Aquel día, sin saberlo, mientras contemplaba a su familia deambular arriba y abajo con las maletas y sostenía el reloj que le había regalado su padre, Max dejó para siempre de ser un niño.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, quote from The Prince of Mist

“La vida de un hombre se divide básicamente en tres períodos. En el primero, uno ni siguiera piensa que envejecerá, ni que el tiempo pasa ni que, desde el primer día, cuando nacemos, caminamos hacia un único fin. Pasada la primera juventud, empieza el segundo período, en el que uno se da cuenta de la fragilidad de la propia vida y lo que en un principio es una simple inquietud va creciendo en el interior como un mar de dudas e incertidumbres que te acompañan durante el resto de tus días. Por último, al final de la vida se abre el tercer período, el de la aceptación de la realidad y, consecuentemente, la resignación y la espera. A lo largo de mi existencia he conocido a muchas personas que se quedaron ancladas en alguno de esos estadios y nunca lograron superarlos. Es algo terrible.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, quote from The Prince of Mist

“Sentía que por primera vez en su vida, el tiempo transcurría más rápido de lo que deseaba y que ya no podía refugiarse en el sueño de años pasados. La rueda de la fortuna había empezado a girar y, esta vez, él no había tirado los dados”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, quote from The Prince of Mist

“Vrijeme ne postoji, zato ga ne možemo gubiti.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, quote from The Prince of Mist

“Cuando llovía con fuerza, Max sentía que el tiempo se detenía. Era como una tregua en la cual uno podía dejar de hacer cualquier cosa que le ocupase en aquel momento y sencillamente acercarse a contemplar el espectáculo de aquella infinita cortina de lágrimas del cielo desde una ventana, durante horas. Dejó de nuevo el libro sobre la mesita y apagó la luz. Lentamente, envuelto en el sonido hipnótico de la lluvia, se rindió al sueño.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, quote from The Prince of Mist

“Había permanecido en la sombra, esperando, sin prisa, a que alguna fuerza lo trajese de nuevo al mundo de los vivos. Y nada tiene tanta fuerza como una promesa...”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, quote from The Prince of Mist

“Fu allora che si accorse di non essere solo all'interno del mausoleo, e che un profilo scuro si muoveva sul soffitto, avanzando silenziosamente come un insetto. Max sentì l'orologio scivolare dalle mani fredde di sudore e alzo lo sguardo. Uno degli angeli di pietra che aveva visto all'entrata camminava capovolto sul soffitto. La figura si fermò e, guardando Max, mostrò un sorriso crudele e allungò un dito accusatore contro di lui.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, quote from The Prince of Mist

“Los malos recuerdos te persiguen sin necesidad de llevarlos contigo”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, quote from The Prince of Mist

“U beskrajnom univerzumu bilo je previše stvari koje su izmicale ljudskom razumijevanju.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, quote from The Prince of Mist

“Pogrešno je misliti da se snovi ostvaruju, a da mi ne ponudimo ništa zauzvrat.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, quote from The Prince of Mist

“Kolo sreće počelo se okretati, ali ovaj put on nije bacio kockice.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, quote from The Prince of Mist

“Morat će proći još mnogo godina prije nego što Max zaboravi ljeto kad je otkrio, gotovo sasma slučajno, magiju.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, quote from The Prince of Mist

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“Centuries of navel-gazing. Millennia of masturbation. Plato to Descartes to Dawkins to Rhanda. Souls and zombie agents and qualia. Kolmogorov complexity. Consciousness as Divine Spark. Consciousness as electromagnetic field. Consciousness as functional cluster.

I explored it all.

Wegner thought it was an executive summary. Penrose heard it in the singing of caged electrons. Nirretranders said it was a fraud; Kazim called it leakage from a parallel universe. Metzinger wouldn't even admit it existed. The AIs claimed to have worked it out, then announced they couldn't explain it to us. Gödel was right after all: no system can fully understand itself.

Not even the synthesists had been able to rotate it down. The load-bearing beams just couldn't take the strain.

All of them, I began to realize, had missed the point. All those theories, all those drugdreams and experiments and models trying to prove what consciousness was: none to explain what it was good for. None needed: obviously, consciousness makes us what we are. It lets us see the beauty and the ugliness. It elevates us into the exalted realm of the spiritual. Oh, a few outsiders—Dawkins, Keogh, the occasional writer of hackwork fiction who barely achieved obscurity—wondered briefly at the why of it: why not soft computers, and no more? Why should nonsentient systems be inherently inferior? But they never really raised their voices above the crowd. The value of what we are was too trivially self-evident to ever call into serious question.

Yet the questions persisted, in the minds of the laureates, in the angst of every horny fifteen-year-old on the planet. Am I nothing but sparking chemistry? Am I a magnet in the ether? I am more than my eyes, my ears, my tongue; I am the little thing behind those things, the thing looking out from inside. But who looks out from its eyes? What does it reduce to? Who am I? Who am I? Who am I?

What a stupid fucking question. I could have answered it in a second, if Sarasti hadn't forced me to understand it first.”
― quote from Blindsight

“One of Roosevelt's most entrenched beliefs, as a cowboy, a hunter, a soldier, and an explorer, was that the health of one man should never endanger the lives of the rest of the men in his expedition. Roosevelt had unflinchingly cast off even good friends like Father Zahm when it became clear that they could no longer pull their own weight or were simply not healthy enough to endure the physical demands of the journey. "No man has any business to go on such a trip as ours unless he will refuse to jeopardize the welfare of his associates by any delay caused by a weakness or ailment of his," he wrote. "It is his duty to go forward, if necessary on all fours, until he drops."...
Roosevelt had even held himself to these unyielding standards after Schrank, the would-be assassin, shot him in Milwaukee. Few men would have even considered giving a speech with a bullet in their chest. Roosevelt had insisted on it. This was an approach to life, and death, that he had developed many years earlier, when living with cowboys and soldiers. "Both the men of my regiment and the friends I had made in the old days in the West were themselves a little puzzled at the interest shown in my making my speech after being shot," he wrote. "This was what they expected, what they accepted as the right thing for a man to do under the circumstances, a thing the nonperformance of which would have been discreditable rather than the performance being creditable.”
― Candice Millard, quote from The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey

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